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THE 

STRENGTH 

OF BEING 

CLEAN 






D'SJORDAN-L-LD 

THE 

DAY'S WORK 

SERIES t 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. 1 Copyright No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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THE 

STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 



El}t ©ag's Moxk Series 



THE STRENGTH 
OF BEING CLEAN 

A Study of the Quest for Unearned 

Happiness 

A Red Cross Address 

BY \y 

DAVID STARR JORDAN 

President of Leland Stanford Jr. University 




BOSTON 
L. C. PAGE ^ COMPANY 

MDCCCC 



46890 



Libr-aAiy of Congress 

"^wo Copies Ueceiveo 
SEP 13 1900 

SeCi'ND COPY. 
OKOti^ CMViSION, 

SEP 21 1900 






80084 

Copyright, igoo 

By L. C. Page and Company 

(incorporated) 

All rights reserved 



(JToIonfal ^ress 

Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. 

Boston. Mass., U. S. A. 



THE 

STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

A STUDY OF THE QUEST FOR UNEARNED HAPPINESS. 



I WISH in thi3 address to make a plea for sound 
and sober life. I hgise this plea on two facts : to be 
clean is to be strong ; no one can secure happiness 
without earning it. 

Among the inalienable rights of man — as our 
fathers have taught us — are these three : *' life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." So long as 
man is alive and free, he will, in one way or another, 
seek that which gives him pleasure, hence life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are in essence 
the same. But the pursuit of happiness is an art 
in itself. To seek it is not necessarily to find it, 
and failure may destroy both liberty and life. Of 
some phases of this pursuit I wish to speak to-day. 
My message is an old one. If by good chance some 
part of it is true, this truth is as old as life itself. 
And if it be true, it is a message that needs to be 
repeated many times to each generation of men. 

5 



6 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

It is one of the laws of life that each acquisition 
has its cost. No organism can exercise power with- 
out yielding up part of its substance. The physio- 
logical law of transfer of energy is the basis of human 
success and happiness. There is no action without 
expenditure of energy, and if energy be not expended, 
the power to generate it is lost. 

This law shows itself in a thousand ways in the 
life of man. The arm which is not used becomes 
palsied. The wealth which comes by chance weakens 
and destroys. (The good which is unused turns to 
evil J The charity which asks no effort " cannot relieve 
the misery she creates." The religion which another 
man would give us we cannot take as a gift. There 
is no Christliness without endeavour. The truth 
which another man has won from nature or from life 
is not our truth until we have lived it. Only that 
becomes real or helpful to any man which has cost 
the sweat of his brow, the effort of his brain, or the 
anguish of his soul. He who would be wise must 
daily earn his wisdom. The parable of the talents 
is the expression of this law, for he who adds not 
effort to power soon loses the power he had. The 
responsibility for effort rests with the individual. 
This need is the m.eaning of individuality, and by it 
each must work out his own salvation, with fear and 
trembling it may be sometimes, and all times with 
perseverance and patience. 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. J 

The greatest source of failure in life comes from 
this. It is easier to be almost right than to be right ; 
to wish, than to gain. In default of gold, there is 
always something almost as good, and which glitters 
equally. In default of possession, illusion can be 
had, and more cheaply. It is possession only which 
costs. Illusion can be had on easy terms, though 
the final end of deception is failure and misery. 
Happiness must be earned, like other good things, -j 
else it cannot be held. It can be deserved only 
where its price has been somehow paid. Nothing 
worth having is given away in this world, — nor 
in any other that we know of. No one rides dead- 
head on the road to happiness. He who tries to 
do so, never reaches his destination. He is left in 
the dumps. 

It is probably too much to say that all of human 
misery can be traced to the dead-head habit. Misery 
has as many phases as humanity. But if we make 
this statement negatively, it will not be far from the 
truth. No one is ever miserable who would truly pay 
the price of happiness. No one is really miserable 
who has not tried to cheapen life. 

The price which every good and perfect gift 
demands, we would somehow or other get out of 
paying. But we can never cheat the gods. Their 
choicest gifts lie not on the bargain counters. Our 
reward comes with our effort. It is part of the same 



8 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

process. In this matter, man gets what he deserves, 
meted out with the justice of eternity. 

In the sense in which I shall use these terms, 
sorrow and misery are not the same thing. They are 
not on speaking terms with each other. True sorrow, 
the pain of loss, is a hallowed suffering. '' For ever 
the other left," is a necessity in a world which each 
one must leave as he entered it, — alone. And we 
would not have it otherwise, for there is in the nature 
of things no other possibility. So long as we live 
we must take chances. Sorrow is sacred. Misery 
is accursed. Sorrow springs from our relations to 
others. Misery we have all to ourselves. As real 
happiness is the glow which accompanies normal 
action, the reflex of the abundance of life, so is 
misery the shadow of dullness, the reflex of failing 
or morbid life. Misery is nature's protest against 
degeneration. 

Human misery may be a symptom, a cause, or 
an effect. It is an expression of degeneration, and 
therefore a symptom of mental and spiritual decay. 
It is a cause of weakness and discouragement, and 
therefore of further degeneration and deeper misery. 
It is an effect of degeneration, and behind personal 
degeneration lies a multitude of causes. None of its 
causes are simple. Some are subjective, the visible 
signs of weak mind or mean spirit. Some are objec- 
tive, the product of evil social conditions, to which 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 9 

the weak mind or mean spirit responds to its further 
injury. None of these can be removed by any single 
social panacea. "The poor we have always with us," 
and there will always be those who shall show that 
**the way of the transgressor is hard." *'The soul 
that sinneth it shall die," will not become a forgotten 
axiom so long as instability of will is a part of human 
nature. 

When I was a boy I once had a primer which gave 
the names of many things which were good and 
many which were bad. Good things were faith, hope, 
charity, piety, and integrity, while anger, selfishness 
and trickery were rightly put down as bad. But 
among the good things, the primer placed "adver- 
sity." This I could not understand, and to this day 
I remember how I was puzzled by it. The name 
" adversity " had a pretty sound, but I found that its 
meaning was the same as " bad luck." ' How can 
bad luck be a good thing.? 

Now that I have grown older and have watched 
men's lives and actions for many years, I can see 
how bad luck is really good. Good or bad is not 
in the thing itself, but in how we take it. If we 
yield and break down under it, it is not good ; but 
neither are we good. It is not in the luck, but in 
ourselves, that the badness is. But if we take hold 
of bad luck bravely, manfully, we may change it into 
good luck, and when we do so we make ourselves 



lO THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

Stronger for the next struggle. It was a fable of 
the Norsemen, that when a man won a victory over 
another, the strength of the conquered' went over 
into his veins. This old fancy has its foundation in 
fact. Whoever has conquered fortune has luck on 
his side for the rest of his life. 

So adversity is good, if only we know how to take 
it. Shall we shrink under it, or shall we react 
against it t Shall we yield or shall we conquer ? 
To react against adversity is to make fortune our 
servant. Its strength goes over to us. To yield is 
to make us fortune's slave. Our strength is turned 
against us in the pressure of circumstances. A fa- 
miliar illustration of what I mean by reaction is this : 
Why do men stand upright } It is because the earth 
pulls them down. If a man yields to its attraction 
he soon finds himself prone on the ground. In this 
attitude he is helpless. He can do nothing there, so 
he reacts against the force of gravitation. He stands 
upon his feet, and the more powerful the force may 
be, the more necessary it is that the active man 
should resist it. When the need for activity ceases, 
man no longer stands erect. He yields to the force 
he has resisted. When he is asleep the force of 
gravitation has its own way so far as his posture is 
concerned. But activity and life demand reaction, 
and it is only through resistance that man can con- 
quer adversity. 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN II 

In like fashion temptation has its part to play in 
the development of character. The strength of life 
is increased by the conquest of temptation. We may 
call no man virtuous till he has won such a victory. 
It is not the absence of temptation, but the reaction 
from it, that ensures the persistence of virtue. If 
sin entice thee, consent thou not, and after awhile 
its allurements will cease to attract. 

In every walk in life, strength comes from effort. 
It is the habit of self-denial which gives the advan- 
tage to men we call self-made. A self-made man, 
if he is made at all, has already won the battle of 
life. He is often very poorly put together. His 
education is incomplete ; his manners may be un- 
couth. His prejudices are often strong. He may 
worship himself and his own oddities. But if he is 
successful in any way in life, he has learned to resist. 
He has learned the value of money, and he has 
learned how to refuse to spend it. He has learned 
the value of time, and how to convert it into money, 
and he has learned to resist all temptations to throw 
either money or time away. He has learned to say 
no. To say no at the right time, and then to stand 
by it, is the first element of success. 

I heard once of a university (it may be in Tartary, 
or it may be in Dreamland) where the students were 
placed in a row, and each one knocked down every 
morning, to teach him self-control. By this means 



12 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

he was made slow to anger. To resist wrath helps 
one to resist other impulses. There is a great value 
in the habit of self-restraint, even when self-gratifi- 
cation is harmless in itself. Some day self-denial 
will be systematically taught to children. It ought 
to be part of the training of men, not through stat- 
utes and regulations, but through the growth of 
severer habits. Whenever we say no to ourselves, 
we gain strength to say no^ if need be, to others. 
The Puritans were strong in their day, and their 
strength has been the backbone of our republic. 
Their power lay not in the narrowness of their 
creed, but in the severity of their practices. Much 
that they condemned was innocent in itself. Some 
things which they permitted were injurious. But 
they were ready to resist whatever they thought was 
wrong. In this resistance they found strength ; and 
they found happiness, too, and somewhat of this 
strength and this happiness has fallen to our 
inheritance. 

I We may wander far from the creeds of our 
fathers ; we may adopt far different clothing, and 
far other customs and practices. But if we would 
have the Puritan's strength, we must hold the Puri- 
tan's hatred of evil. Our course of life must be as 
narrow as his ; for the way that leads to power in 
life must ever be strait and stony. It is still true, 
and will be true for ever, that the broad roads and 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 1 3 

flowery paths lead to weakness and misery, not to 
happiness and strength. There is no real happiness 
j that does not involve self-denial. 

So there never was unearned happiness, yet thou- 
sands there be in quest of it, and some have thought 
for the moment that they held it in their grasp. The 
failure of this quest is the source of the great prob- 
lems of society, — the labour problem, the temper- 
ance problem, the social evil, and the thousand 
others which vex civilised society ; problems which 
can never be solved until each man shall solve his 
own for himself. Each pleasure that comes to us 
free from effort and free from responsibility turns 
into misery in our hands. Happiness comes from 
the normal exercise of life's functions in any grade, 
doing, thinking, fighting, overcoming, planning, lov- 
ing. It is active, positive, strengthening. It does 
not burn out as it glows. Happiness leaves room for 
more happiness. Even war and strife make room 
for love. Love, too, is a positive word. Not love, — 
but loving. And loving brings happiness only as it 
works itself out into living action. The love that 
would end in no helping act and no purpose or re- 
sponsibility is a mere torture of the mind. 

The brain is the organ of consciousness, and there- 
fore the seat of conscious happiness. Happiness is 
the signal, " All is well," that is passed from one 
nerve-cell to another. To choose among different 



14 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

possible courses of action is the primary function of 
the intellect. To choose at all, impHes the choice of 
the best. In the long run, only those who choose the 
best survive. The best each one must find out for 
himself. To choose the best is the art of existence. 
Of all the fine arts, this is the finest and noblest. 
By the best we mean that which makes for abun- 
dance of life, — for ourselves and for others. The 
best for to-day may not be the real best, as the best 
for self may not be the best for others, and if it is 
not best in the long run, it is not the best at all. 
The conciliation of duties to self with duties to others, 

^ of altruism with egoism, is again the art of life. 
To learn this art is to develop the greatest effective- 
ness, the most perfect self-realisation, and therefore 
the greatest possibility for happiness. 

In the quest for happiness, effectiveness rather 

^ than pleasure must be the real object of pursuit. For 
effectiveness in a high sense will bring happiness, 
while many of the apparent pleasures of life are only 
the masks of misery. To the tendency to forsake 
normal effort to follow these, we give the name of 
temptation. Temptation resisted strengthens the 
mind and the soul. Not to escape temptation, but to 
master it, is the way to righteousness. Innocence is 
not necessarily virtue, and may be farther from 
it than vice itself. We may call no man virtuous 
till he has passed from innocence to the conquest of 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN I 5 

temptation. Any fool may be innocent. It takes a 
wise man to be virtuous. 

In a recent journal, Mr. William C. Morrow tells a 
story of a clergyman and a vagabond. They met 
by chance on the street, where the very incongruity 
of their lives drew them together. Each was 
tempted by the other. The young student of divin- 
ity, fresh from the seminary, in black broadcloth and 
unspotted necktie, seemed to the vagabond so pure, 
so clean, so innocent, that suddenly his soul arose in 
revolt against his past life, his vulgar surroundings, 
his squalid future. The inspiration of the unspoiled 
example gave him strength to resist. For a moment, 
at least, he threw off the chains which years of weak- 
ness had fastened upon him. The clergyman, on the 
other hand, found a fascination in sin. It seemed to 
come to him as an illumination of the realities of life, 
a contrast to a life of empty words and dry asceticism. 
All the yearning curiosity of his suppressed impulses 
called out for the freedom of the vagabond. His 
mouth watered for the untasted fruits of life. These 
unknown joys seemed to him the only joys there 
were. He had never known temptation, and hence 
had never resisted it. To his innocence, the cheap 
meanness of sin was not revealed. 

As it chanced, so the story goes, when next the 
pair met, the vagabond and the minister, they had 
exchanged places. From the curbstone pulpit, 



1 6 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

the vagabond spoke to his fellow sinners in words 
that burned, for they came from the fulness of his 
experience. He had met the Devil face to face, and 
could speak as one who knew him, and who would, if 
he could, cast off his horrid chains. As he went on 
with his harangue, the other came up, dishevelled 
of garment and unsteady of step, his speech reeking 
with foulness and profanity. The pleasures of sin 
were his for the season, and the policeman led him 
on to the city jail to sober up. There he would 
have leisure to cast up the account in the bitterness 
which follows unresisted temptation. 

Perhaps this is not a true story, but its like is true 
every day. It is only the strength of past resistance 
that saves us from sin. If we know it and fight it, 
it will not take us unawares. 

In the barber shop of a hotel in Washington, this 
inscription is written on the mirror : " There is no 
I pleasure in life equal to that of the conquest of a 
vicious habit." This the barber keeps before him 
every day. It is no idle word, but the lesson of his 
life; a life of struggle against the temptation of 
self-indulgence. 

In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out 
in life to be wicked. There are some such, fiends 
by blood and birth, but you and I do not meet 
them very often. The sinner is the man who cannot 
say no. For sin to become wickedness is a matter 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 1 7 

of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded 
up as vice calls for the sacrifice. In Kipling's fable 
of Parrenness, the slave of vice is asked to surrender 
one after another his trust in man, his faith in woman, 
and the hopes and conscience of his childhood. In 
exchange for all these, the demon left him just a 
little crust of dry bread. 

It is because decay goes on step by step that bad 
men are not all bad, as good men are not wholly 
good. In the stories of Bret Harte, the gamblers 
and sots are capable of pure impulses and of noble 
self-devotion. The pathos of Dickens rests largely 
on the same kindly fact. It is indeed a fact, and 
those who would save such people should keep it 
constantly in mind. 

I number among my friends, if he be living yet, 
which I doubt, an old miner, who has had a hard, 
wild life. He was a victim of drink, and the savage 
Keeley cure did not save him from delirium tremens. 
He walked from Los Gatos to Palo Alto for such 
help as might be found there. As he sat waiting 
in my house, a little child, who had never known sin, 
came into the room and fearlessly offered him his 
hand. This a grown man would not do without 
shrinking, but the child had not learned to be a 
respecter of persons. The scarred face lightened ; 
the visions of demons vanished for a moment, and 
the poor man repeated almost to himself these words 



1 8 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

of Dickens : " I know now how Jesus could liken 
the kingdom of God to a child." 

The primal motive of most forms of sin is the 
^ desire to make a short cut to happiness. We yield 
to temptation because it promises pleasure without 
the effort of earning it. This promise is one which 
has never been fulfilled in all the history of all the 
ages, and it is time that men were coming to realise 
that fact. The happiness that is earned lasts to 
make way for more happiness. The unearned pleas- 
ures are mere illusions, and as they pass away, their 
final legacy is weakness and pain. They leave "a 
dark brown taste in the mouth ; " their recollection 
is "different in the morning." Such pleasures, as 
Robert Burns, who had tried many of them, truth- 
fully says, **are like poppies spread," or "like the 
snowfalls on the river." 

But true happiness leaves no reaction. The mind 
is at rest within itself, and the consciousness is filled 
with the joy of living. 

The short cuts to happiness which temptation 
commonly offers to you and to me, I may roughly 
divide into five classes : 

I. Indolence. This is the attempt to secure the 
pleasures of rest without the effort that justifies 
rest and makes it welcome. When a man shuns 
effort, he is in no position to resist temptation. So, 
through all the ages, idleness has been known as 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 1 9 

the parent of all the vices. " Life drives him hard " 
who has nothing in the world to do. The dry-rot 
of ennui, the vague self-disgust of those who cannot 
"deal with time," is the natural result of idleness. 
It is said that " the very fiends weave ropes of sand, 
rather than face pure hell in idleness." It is only 
where even such poor effort is impossible that abso- 
lute misery can be found. The indolent ennui of 
the hopelessly rich and the indolent misery of the 
helplessly poor have this much in common. The 
quest for happiness is become a passive one, waiting 
for the joy that never comes. But life can never 
remain passive. That only is passive which is dead, 
and all the many evils of life come through the open 
door of unresisted temptation. 

2. Gambling. In all its forms gambling is the 
desire to get something for nothing. Burglary and 
larceny have the same motive. Along this line, the 
difference between gambling and stealing is one fixed 
by social customs and prejudices. The thief may be 
a welcome member of society if he is the right kind 
of a thief, and successful in keeping within the rules 
we have adopted for our game of social advancement. 
In society, money is power. It is the visible repre- 
sentation of stored up power, whether of ourselves 
or of others. It is said that the " love of money is 
the root of all evil." The love of money is the love 
of power. But it is not true that the love of power 



20 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

is the root of all evil. To love power is natural 
to the strong. To wish for money is natural to 
him who knows how to use it. The desire to get 
money without earning it is the root of all evil. Only 
evil comes through the search for unearned happi- 
ness through unearned power. To get something 
for nothing, in whatever way, demoralises effort. 
The man who gets a windfall spends his days 
watching the wind. The man who wins in a lottery 
spends his gains in more lottery tickets. The man 
who loses in a lottery does the same thing. In all 
forms of gambling, to win is to lose, for the winner's 
integrity is placed in jeopardy. To lose is to lose, 
for the loser throws good money after bad, and that, 
too, is demoralising. 

The appeal to chance, the spirit of speculation, 
whatever form it may take, is adverse to individual 
prosperity. It makes for personal degeneration and 
therefore for social decay. 

3. Licentiousness. More wide-spread and more 
insidious than the quest for unearned power is the 
search for the unearned pleasures of love, without 
love's duties or love's responsibilities. The way to 
unearned love lies through the valley of the shadow 
of death. The path is white with dead men's bones. 

Just as honest love is the most powerful influence 
for good that can enter into a man's life, so is love's 
counterfeit the most disintegrating. Love is a 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 21 

Sturdy plant of vigorous growth, with wondrous 
promise of flower and fruitage, but it will not spring 
from the ashes of lust. 

In the economy of human life, love looks forward 
to the future. Its glory is in its altruism. The 
mother gives her life and strength to the care of 
the child, and to the building of the home. The 
father stands guard over the life and welfare of 
mother and child alike. To shirk responsibility is 
to destroy the home. The equal marriage demands 
equal purity of heart, and equal chastity of intention. 
Without this, " Sweet love were slain," and " Love 
is the greatest thing in the world," because it is the 
greatest source of happiness. 

Not strife nor war nor hatred is love's greatest 
enemy. Love's arch foe is lust. To shirk the bonds 
of love for the irresponsible joys of lust is the Devil's 
choicest temptation. Open vice brings with a cer- 
tainty disease and degradation. To associate with 
the vile is to assume their vileness, and this in no 
occult or metaphorical sense, either. Secret vice 
comes to the same end, but all the more surely, be- 
cause the folly of lying is added to the other agencies 
of decay. The man who tries to lead a double life 
is either a neurotic freak, or else the prince of fools. 
Generally he is something of both at first, and at the 
last an irreclaimable scoundrel. That society is so 
severe in its condemnation of the double life is an 



22 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

expression of the bitterness of its own experience. 
There is real meaning behind each of society's con- 
ventionaHties. Its condemnation is never unreason- 
ing, though it may lack in sense of proportion. 
"Even the angels," Emerson says, "must respect 
the proprieties." The basis of the proprieties of 
social life is that no man should shrink from the 
cost of that which he desires. It is not only the 
gross temptations which the wise man must resist. 
There is much that passes under other names which 
is only veiled licentiousness. The word flirtation 
covers a multitude of sin. To breathe the aroma 
of love, in pure selfishness, without an atom of 
altruistic responsibility, is the motive of flirtation. 
To touch a woman's hand in wantonness may be to 
poison her life and yours. The strongest forces of 
human life are not subjects for idle play. The real 
heart and soul of a man are measured by the truth 
he shows to woman. A man's ideal of womanhood 
is fixed by the woman he seeks. By a man's ideal 
of womanhood we may know the degree of his 
manhood. 

4. Precocity. In the hotbed of modern society 
there is a tendency to precocious growth. Preco- 
cious virtue, as the Sunday-school books used to 
describe it, is bad enough ; but precocious vice is 
most monstrous. Precocious fruit is not good fruit. 
The first ripened apples have always a worm at the 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 23 

core. What is worth having must bide its time. To 
seize it before its time is to pluck it prematurely. 

It may be that "boys will be boys," as people 
say, but if boys will be boys in a bad sense, they 
will never be men. The wild oats they sow sprout 
early and grow fast, and " send their roots into the 
spinal column, till by and by, to our horror, we find 
ourselves grown through and through." Our duties 
to our after selves are more vital than our duties to 
our present selves, or our duties to society. To guard 
his own future is the greatest duty the young man 
owes to society. If all men lived in such fashion 
that remorse was unknown, the ills of society would 
mostly vanish. It is our own past deeds which are 
our real masters. 

In the life of the lower animals nature guards 
against precocity. Among the beasts no one takes 
to himself the pleasures of life till he can carry its 
responsibilities. The precocious fish dies in the act 
of spawning. The old males among polygamous ani- 
mals — cattle, deer, fur-seals — bar out the young. 
Their place they must take before they can enjoy 
it. The female scorns the male who is immature. 
He must bide his time, and develop his strength 
in patience. 

But the immature child is brought at once among 
temptations he cannot resist, because he cannot 
understand them. The gauntlet of obscene sug- 



24 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

gestions in our cities is one of the most terrible 
our children have to face. We judge of the wicked- 
ness of Pompeii by evil signs and paintings, which 
the baptism of fire and eighteen centuries of burial 
have failed to purify. They are still mute witnesses 
of a personal degeneration toward which they once 
served to entice. If San Francisco were to be buried 
to-day, some future generation would judge us thus 
severely. The bill-boards of the vulgar theatres, with 
their suggestions of vice and crime, might be mute 
witnesses to the social decay of our republic. They 
do not tell the whole story of American life, but their 
testimony is honest so far as it goes. It is the call 
to unearned pleasures, the call to degradation, and 
our children, as they pass, cannot choose but listen. 

The children on our streets grow old before their 
time, and there is no fate more horrible because 
there is none more hopeless. Were it not for the 
influx of new life from the farms, our cities would 
be depopulated. Strive as we may, we cannot save 
our children from the corrosion of vulgarity and 
obscene suggestion. The subtle incitement to vice 
comes to every home. Its effect is shown in pre- 
cocious knowledge, the loss of the bloom of youth, 
the quest for pleasures unearned, because sought for 
out of time. 

Vulgarity has in some measure its foundation in 
precocity. It is an expression of arrested develop- 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 25 

ment in matters of good taste or good character. 
To be vulgar is to do that which is not the best of its 
kind. It is to do poor things in poor ways, and to 
be satisfied with that. Vulgarity weakens the mind, 
and thus brings all other weakness in its train. It is 
vulgar to wear dirty linen when one is not engaged in 
dirty work. It is vulgar to like poor music, to read 
weak books, to feed on sensational newspapers, to 
trust to patent medicines, to find amusement in 
trashy novels, to enjoy vulgar theatres, to find pleas- 
ure in cheap jokes, to tolerate coarseness and loose- 
ness in any of its myriad forms. We find the 
corrosion of vulgarity everywhere, and its poison 
enters every home. The bill-boards of our cities are 
covered with its evidences, our newspapers are redo- 
lent with it, our story-books reek with it, our schools 
are tainted by it, and we cannot keep it out of our 
homes, or our churches, or our colleges. 

It is the hope of civilisation that our republic may 
outgrow the toleration of vulgarity, but that is still 
a long way in the future. It is said that " vulgarity 
is the besetting sin of democracy." This one might 
believe, were it not that the most vulgar city in the 
world, the one from which vulgarity rises like an 
exhalation, is one of the least democratic. It is in 
democracy, the training of the common man, that 
we can find the only permanent antidote to vulgarity. 

The second power of vulgarity is obscenity, and 



26 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

this vice is like the pestilence. Wherever it finds 
lodgment it kills. It fills the mind with vile pictures, 
which will come up again and again, standing in the 
way of all healthful effort. Those who have studied 
the life history of the homeless poor tell us that 
obscenity, and not drink, is the primal cause of the 
ineffectiveness of most of them. In the ranks of 
the unemployed, besides the infirm and the unfortu- 
nate, is the vast residue of the unemployable. The 
most of these are rendered so by the utter decay 
of force which comes from the habit of obscenity. 
The forces which make for vulgarity tend also to- 
ward obscenity, for all inane vulgarity tends to grow 
obscene. The open door of the saloon makes it 
a centre of corrosion, and the miserable habit of 
treating, which we call American, but which exists 
wherever the tippling-house exists, spreads and in- 
tensifies it. There is no great virtue in statutes 
to keep men sober. I would as soon " see the whole 
world drunk through choice as sober through com- 
pulsion," because compulsion cannot give strength 
to the individual man. The resistance to temptation 
must come from within. So far as the drink of 
drunkards is concerned, prohibition does not prohibit. 
But to clean up a town, to free it from corrosion, 
saves men, and boys and girls too, from vice, and 
who shall say that moral sanitation is not as much 
the duty of the community as physical sanitation? 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 2/ 

The city of the future will not permit the existence 
of slums and dives and tippling-houses. It will 
prohibit their existence for the same reason that 
it now prohibits pig-pens and dung-heaps and cess- 
pools. For where all these things are, slums and 
cesspools, saloons and pig-pens, there the people 
grow weak and die. 

A form of vulgarity is profanity. This is the sign 
of a dull, coarse, unrefined nature. There are times, 
perhaps, when profanity is picturesque and effective. 
In Arizona sometimes it is so, and I have seen it so 
in Wyoming. But not indoors nor in the streets nor 
under normal conditions. It is then simply an insult 
to the atmosphere which is vulgarised for the pur- 
pose. It is not that profanity is offensive to God. 
He may deal with it in his own way. It is offensive 
to man and destructive to him. It hurts the man 
who uses it. "What cometh out of a man defileth 
him," and the man thus defiled extends his corrosion 
to others. 

5. Intemperance. The basis of intemperance is the 
effort to secure through drugs the feeling of happi- 
ness when happiness does not exist. Men destroy 
their nervous system for the tingling pleasures they 
feel as its structures are torn apart. There are many 
drugs which cause this pleasure, and in proportion to 
the delight they seem to give is the real mischief they 
work. 



28 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

Pain is the warning to the brain that something is 
wrong in the organ in which the pain is felt. Some- 
times that which should be felt as pain is interpreted 
as pleasure. If a man lay his fingers upon an anvil 
and strike them one by one. with a hammer, the brain 
will feel the shock as pain. It will give orders to 
have the blows checked. 

But if, through some abnormal condition, some 
twist of the nerves, or clot on the brain, the injury 
were felt as exquisite delight, there would arise the 
impulse to repeat it. This would be a temptation. 
The knowledge of the injury which the eye would 
tell to the brain would lead the will to stop the blows. 
The impulse of delight would plead for their repeti- 
tion, and in this fashion the hand might be sacrificed 
for a feeling of pleasure, which is no pleasure at all, 
but a form of mania. Of this character is the effect 
of all nerve-exciting drugs. As a drop of water is of 
the nature of the sea, so in its degree is the effect 
of alcohol, opium, tobacco, cocaine, kola, tea or cof- 
fee, of the nature of mania. They give a feeling of 
pleasure or rest, when rest or pleasure does not exist. 
This feeling arises from injury to the nerves which 
the brain does not truthfully interpret. 

There have been men in abnormal conditions who 
felt mutilation as pleasure in the way I have just 
described. Men have paid others to pinch their 
bodies, to tear their flesh, to bruise their bones, for 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 29 

the exquisite delight in self-mutilation. This feeling 
is the basis for the extraordinary mania which shows 
itself from time to time among those sects who 
call themselves Flagellantes and Penitentes. Such 
extravagance is not religion ; it was never translated 
into sane and helpful life ; it is madness, and drunk- 
enness is madness also. Differing in degree and 
somewhat in kind, it has yet the same original 
motive, self-destruction, because of the temptation 
of imaginary pleasure. 

To make clear what I have to say, we must con- 
sider for a moment the nature of the mind. It is the 
brain's business to know, to think, to will, and to act. 
All these functions taken together we call the mind. 
The brain is hidden in darkness, sheltered within a 
bony box, and from all the nerves of sense it receives 
impressions of the outside world and of the conditions 
of the parts of the body. These impressions are the 
basis of knowledge. All that we know comes to us 
in one way or another through the nerves of sense. 
It is all drawn from our experience of the world 
through the brain. 

These impressions are compared one with another, 
and brought into relations with past experiences, that 
the mind may deduce the real truth from them. This 
is the process of thought, which has many forms and 
many variations. 

The purpose of knowledge is action. When we 



30 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

see or feel or hear anything, what are we going to 
do about it ? The function of sensation is to enable 
the body to act safely and wisely. Hence the brain 
controls the muscles. Hence thought always tends 
to go over into action. The sense organs are the 
brain's only teacher. The muscles are its only ser- 
vants. But there are many orders which can be 
issued to these servants. There are many sensa- 
tions and many thoughts, each calling for action, 
and these actions may be incongruous one with an- 
other. How shall the brain choose } This is the 
function of the will. It is the duty of the will to 
choose the best action and to suppress all the others. 
The power of attention enables us to fix the mind on 
the sensations or impressions of most worth, and to 
push the others into the background. These com- 
peting sensations are not alone those of the present ; 
the memory pictures of all past impressions linger 
in the brain, and these arise, bidden or unbidden, to 
mingle with the others. To know the relation of 
these, to distinguish present impressions from mem- 
ories, to distinguish recollections from realities, is the 
condition of sanity. This is mental health, when 
the machinery of the brain and nerves performs each 
its appointed task ; when the mind is clear, the will 
strong, the attention persistent, and all is well with 
the world. 

But there are many conditions in which the 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 3 1 

machinery of the brain fails. The mind grows 
confused. It cannot tell memories from realities. 
Its power of attention flags. A fixed idea, not re- 
lated to external things, may take possession of the 
mind, or the will may fail, and the mind may be con- 
trolled by a thousand vagrant impressions (really 
forgotten memory pictures) in as many seconds. 
In any case, the response of the muscles in action 
becomes uncertain. The action does not respond 
to external conditions, but to internal whims. The 
deeds which result from these whims may be 
dangerous to the subject himself, or to others. This 
is a condition of mania, or of mental irresponsi- 
bility. 

Some phase of mental unsoundness is the natural 
effect of any of those drugs called stimulants or nar- 
cotics. Alcohol gives a feeling of warmth or vigour 
or exhilaration, when the real warmth or vigour or 
exhilaration does not exist. Tobacco gives a feeling 
of rest which is not restfulness. The use of opium 
seems to intensify the imagination, giving its clumsy 
wings a wondrous power of flight. It destroys the 
sense of time and space, but it is in time and 
space alone that man has his being. Cocaine 
gives a strength which is not strength. Strych- 
nine quickens the motor response which follows 
sensation. Coffee and tea, like alcohol, enable one 
to borrow from his future store of force for present 



32 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

purposes, and none of these make any provision for 
paying back the loan. One and all these various 
drugs tend to give the impression of a power or a 
pleasure, or an activity, which we do not possess. 
One and all their function is to force the nervous 
system to lie. One and all the result of their habit- 
ual use is to render the nervous system incapable of 
ever telling the truth. One and all their supposed 
pleasures are followed by a reaction of subjective 
pains as spurious and as unreal as the pleasures 
which they follow. Each of them, if used to excess, 
brings in time insanity, incapacity, and death. With 
each of them, the first use makes the second easier. 
To yield to temptation, makes it easier to yield 
again. The weakening effect on the will is 
^ greater than the injury to the body. In fact, the 
harm alcoholic and similar excesses do to the body is 
wholly secondary. It is the visible reflex of the harm 
already done to the nervous system. 

While all this is true, I do not wish to take an 
extreme position. I do not care to sit in judgment 
on the tired woman with her cup of tea, the workman 
with his pipe or his glass of beer. A glass of claret 
may sometimes help digestion by a trick on the 
glands of the stomach. A cup of coffee may give 
an apparent strength we greatly need. A good cigar 
may soothe the nerves. A bottle of cool beer on a 
hot day may be refreshing. A white lie oils the 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 33 

hinges of society. These things are the white lies of 
physiology. \ 

I make no attack on the use of claret at dinner, or 
beer as medicine. This is a matter of taste, though 
not to my taste. Each of these drugs leaves a scar 
on the nerves ; a small scar, if you please, and we 
cannot go through the battle of life without many 
scars of one kind or another. Moderate drink-/ 
ing is not so very bad, so long as it stays mod- 
erate. It is much like moderate lying — or, to use 
Beecher's words, "like beefsteak with incidental ar- 
senic." It will weaken your will somewhat, but 
may be you are strong enough for that. It was 
once supposed that intemperance was like gluttony, — 
the excessive use of that which was good. It was 
not then known that all nerve-exciters contained a 
specific poison, and that in this poison such apparent 
pleasure as they seemed to give must lie. 

Use these drugs if you can afford it. There are 
many worthy gentlemen who use them all in modera- 
tion, and who have the strength to abstain from what 
they call their abuse. You will find among drinkers 
and smokers some of the best men you know, while 
some of the greatest scoundrels alive are abstemious 
to the last degree. They dare not be otherwise. They 
need all the strength and cunning they have to use 
in their business. Wine loosens the tongue and lets 
fly the secrets one has need to hide. 



34 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

But whatever others may do with seeming im- 
punity, the young man who guards his own future 
cannot afforci to take chances. Whatever you do, let 
it be of your own free choice. (Count all the cost.) 
Take your stand, with open eyes, and hold it without 
remorse. "With open eyes have I dared it," said 

^ Ulrich Von Hutten when he gave up his life for free- 
dom of speech, " and I cherish no regret." The wise 
man must accept his punishment, if punishment must 
come, as Hutten did his martyrdom. "With open 
eyes have I dared it, and cherish no regret." 

There is nothing more hopeless than the ineffective 
remorse of a man who drinks and wishes that he did 
not. If you don't want to do a thing, then don't do 
it. The only way to reform is to stop, stop ! stop ! 

\ and go at once to doing something else. 

The really "good fellow "can be convivial when 
he is sober. It is a poor kind of good fellowship 
which cannot be found till it is saturated with drink. 
But whatever you may think or do as to table drink- 
ing, the use of beer, coffee, and the like, there is no 
question as to the evil of perpendicular drinking, or 
drinking for drink's sake. Men who drink in saloons 
do so for the most part for the wrench on the ner- 
vous system. They drink to forget. They drink to 
be happy. They drink to be drunk. Sometimes it 
is a periodical attack of madness. Sometimes it is 

^ a chronic thirst. Whichever it is, its indulgence 



THE STRENGTH OJ^ BEING CLEAN 35 

destroys the soundness of life; it destroys accuracy 
of thought and action ; it destroys wisdom and vir- 
tue ; it destroys faith and hope and love. It brings 
a train of subjective horrors, which the terrified 
brain cannot interpret, and which we call delirium 
tremens. This is mania, indeed, but every act which 
injures the faithfulness of the nervous system is a 
step long or short in this direction. 

Some six years ago, in the San Francisco Exam- 
inery Mr. Arthur McEwen records the words of an 
old sailor, called " Longshore Pots," who gave a 
striking account of what he calls "The Shock." 
A young man with money and ambition starts out 
to enjoy life. He is " Hail fellow well met," "afraid 
of no man," and " nobody's enemy but his own." He 
frequents the clubs ; he plays the races, and he is 
with the gayest in all gay company. He thinks well 
of himself ; he has a good time, and he knows no 
reason why others should not think well of him. 
This goes on for a year or two, when the pace 
begins to prove too rapid. The "difference in the 
morning " becomes disagreeable. It interferes with 
business, it spoils pleasure. The only thing to do 
is to go still faster. The race down the cocktail 
route helps to forget. Suddenly the man gets sight 
of himself. He catches his face in the glass. He 
sees himself as others see him. Instead of " the 
jolly good fellow, which nobody can deny," he gets 



36 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

the glimpse of a useless, helpless sot. He sees a 
man who has spent his substance, has disgraced his 
name, has ruined his home, has broken the heart of 
his wife, has beggared his children, has lost the 
respect of others, and the respect of himself. This 
is the Shock ! When it has come, he is henceforth 
j good for nothing, for there is no virtue in maudlin 
remorse ; no hope in alcoholic repentance. There is 
nothing that can save him but to stop, and it takes 
something of manhood to do this. 

Such tears of remorse are not ''tears from the 
depths of some divine despair." They are rather 
^ due to the fact that alcohol irritates the lachrymal 
glands. Harold Frederic's story of Theron Ware 
is a characteristic study of the deterioration of the 
good young man who is only "accidentally good," 
and who has within him neither manliness nor 
strength when temptation comes in unexpected 
forms. 

With most men sin comes not as a result of 
strong passion, ungovernable impulses, and revolt 
against conventions. As with Theron Ware, it is 
an outcome of weak will, scanty brains, and un- 
checked selfishness, brought in contact with petty 
or nasty temptation of corrosion. 

It is true that there are cases of another kind. 
• There are some men whose untamable independ- 
ence leads them into paths of danger simply as a 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 37 

revolt from tiresome conventionalities. They sin 
because they will not be tied to the apron strings 
of society.) For these lawless, turbulent, self-de-v^ 
fiant spirits, there is always great hope ; for when 
they find themselves entangled in the convention- 
alities of evil, tied to (the apron strings of the devil,) 
they are likely to break away again, and lead lives 
all the more worthy, because they have found the 
path of wisdom and strength for themselves. To 
this class belong the subjects of the great conver- 
sions, the real brands Cwho have snatched them- 
selves from the real burnings. ^ 

"What a world this would be without coffee," 
said one old pessimist to another, as they sat and 
growled together at an evening reception. " What 
a world it is with coffee," said the other, for he 
knew that the only solace coffee could give was, 
that it seemed for the moment to repair the injury zs 
its own excessive use had brought. No stimulant 
or narcotic can ever do more than this. / They help \ 
us to forget time and space and ourselves, — all we ' 
have worth remembering, y " With health and a 
day " man " can put the pomp of emperors to 
shame." Without time and space he can do nothing. 
He is nothing. 

"There is joy in life," says Sullivan, the pugi- 
list, "but it is known only to the man who has a > 
few jolts of liquor under his belt." To know this 



38 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN, 

kind of joy is to put oneself beyond the reach of 
all others. 

The joy of the blue sky, the bright sunshine, 
the rushing torrent, the songs of birds, "sweet as 
children's prattle is," the breath of the meadows, 
the glow of effort, the beauty of poetry, the achieve- 
ment of thought, the thousand and thousand real 
pleasures of life, are inaccessible to him "who has 
a few jolts of liquor under his belt," while the 
sorrows he feels, or thinks he feels, are as unreal 
as his joys, and as unworthy of a life worth living. 

There was once, I am told, a man who came into 
his office smacking his lips, and said to his clerk, 
" The world looks very different to the man who has 
had a good glass of brandy and soda in the morning. " 
"Yes," said the clerk, "and the man looks different 
to the world." 

And this is natural and inevitable, for the pleasure 
which exists only in imagination leads to action 
which has likewise nothing to do with the demands 
of life. The mind is confused, and may be delighted 
with the confusion, but the confused muscles tremble 
and halt. The tongue is loosened and utters un- 
finished sentences ; the hand is loosened, and the 
handwriting is shaky ; the muscles of the eyes are 
unharnessed, and the two eyes move independently 
and see double ; the legs are loosened, and the con- 
fusion of the brain shows itself in the confused walk. 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 39 

And if this confusion is long continued, the mental 
deterioration shows itself in external things, the 
shabby hat and seedy clothing, and the gradual drop 
of the man from stratum to stratum of society, till he 
brings up some night in the ditch. As the world 
looks more and more different to him, so does he 
look more and more different to the world. 

A prominent lawyer of Boston once told me that 
the great impulse to total abstinence came to him 
when a young man, from hearing his fellow lawyers 
talking over their cups. The most vital secrets of 
their cHents' business were made public property 
when their tongues were loosened by wine ; and this 
led my friend to the firm resolution that nothing should 
go into his mouth which would prevent him from 
keeping it closed unless he wanted to open it. The < 
time will come when the only opening for the ambi- j 
tious man of intemperate habits will be in politics. It 
is rapidly becoming so now. Private employers dare 
not trust their business to the man who drinks. The 
great corporations dare not. He is not wanted on the 
railroads. The steamship lines have long since cast 
him off. The banks dare not use him. He cannot 
keep accounts. Only the people, long-suffering and 
generous, remain as his resource. For this reason, 
municipal government is his specialty ; and while this 
patience of the people lasts, our cities will breed 
scandals as naturally as our swamps breed malaria. 



40 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN, 

Akin to intemperance is the drug habit. I have 
no desire to indulge in sweeping condemnations. The 
development of corrective and preventive surgery is 
one of the glories of modern science. The use of 
medicines for corrective and preventive purposes is 
often most wise and necessary ; but the constant re- 
course to drugs for every conceivable purpose is one 
of the most discouraging features of our civilisation. 
The vast array of nerve foods, tonics and appetizers 
have some poisonous stimulant as the basis of their 
effects. The cures they perform are, for the most 
4^ part, cheats and impositions, and the final evil results 
invite fresh attacks from frauds and impostors. 
There is no agent in the degradation of the Ameri- 
can press more potent than the advertisement of the 
quack doctor. The desire to secure this advertise- 
ment leads the paper to pander to the tastes of the 
fools on whose life blood the medical frauds will 
feed. 

All that a drug can do, for the most part, is to 
change the stress in the process of life. It can 
create nothing. It cannot bring health. Health is 
^ to the physical body what happiness is to the mind. 
It is the glow that accompanies normal effort ; 
and this glow must be preceded by effort. No 
drug can take the place of exercise, and no hysteria 
of the imagination is a substitute for the sanity of 
health. The drug habit, and its second stage, patent 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 4 1 

medicine habit, and its third stage called mental heal- 
ing, arise from the desire to make a short cut to 
health, and thus to happiness. Its continuance is 
the mark as well as the cause of personal degenera- 
tion. It has been said that " civilisation is a disease 
of the nerves." This is nonsense, as the wisdom, 
effort, continuity, and virtue on which civilisation 
depends are matters demanding the most perfect 
mental health. But a " disease of the nerves " is 
among civihsatio'n's by-products. The conquests of 
civilisation, in the hands of incompetents, are as 
"edged tools in the hands of fools." They furnish 
effectual means of enforcing the penalties of folly. 
Whether, in medical matters, one places his faith in 
the touch of a king or a lunatic, in blessed handker- 
chiefs or old bones, in a figment of the imagination 
or in a bottle of cocaine or the oil of celery, the men- 
tal attitude is much the same. It is the attitude 
of skepticism toward knowledge. The philosophy of 
ignorance is the doubt of the existence of knowledge 
or skill. Its hope is that of finding without effort 
the short cut to results which only knowledge and 
skill give. 

A wise teacher of women, Anne Pay son Call, has 
said that always and ever ''sham emotions torture, : 
whether they be of love, religion, or liquor." A sham 
■ emotion, in this sense, is an impulse or sensation, 
^cultivated for its own sake, with no purpose that it 1 







42 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 

shall ever be translated into action. This is the 
" rose pink sentimentalism " so abhorred by Carlyle 
as " the second power of a lie, the tissue of deceit 
that has never been and never can be woven into 
action." 

And in the lives of women, in particular, the short 
cut to happiness through emotionalism is one too 
often traversed. "Emotional excess," continues Miss 
Call, " is a woman's form of drunkenness. Nervous 
prostration is her delirium tremens." 

For emotion or sensation to go over into action 
is to follow the normal law of the mind. To cultivate 
sensation for sensation's sake, with no purpose be- 
yond it, whether of art, music, love, or religion, 
is to live a sensuous life, and this is ultimately a life 
of weakness and decadence. To cultivate emotion 
without effort at action is to keep the nervous system 
in a state of excitement as ineffective as the exhil- 
aration of alcohol. The influence of intense senti- 
mentalism and emotional gush, whether religious 
or secular, is as evil as the influence of liquor, and 
works in much the same way, a fact to which the 
wise John Wesley long ago called the attention 
of his followers. 

If religious excitement is used as a source of 
pleasurable thrills, it is as destructive to the nervous 
system as any other form of lying that may be 
forced upon it. The religion which shows itself in 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 43 

trances, catalepsy, and hysteria is not religion at all, 
but mania. It is a sign of the softening of the 
brain, not of the salvation to the soul. 

Of like nature is the disposition to live in dreams, 
to give oneself up to reverie. To live in two 
worlds at once is to unfit oneself for life in any 
world. It is to make a short cut to unreal happiness 
by turning oneself away from the only way to the 
happiness that now is.* There are many other ways 
in which the evils of short cuts to happiness show 
themselves. The habit of envy is one of these, 
the jealousy of the weak for the fortunate, the 
belief that in some way or another our misery is 
the work of some one whose patience seems rewarded 
with prosperity. Many a vagabond looks upon a man 
with a clean collar as a man who has robbed him, and 
to make the most of this jealousy is the stock in 
trade of many of our agitators and politicians. The 
motive force of much that calls itself social reform 
is the hope that those who deserve nothing will get 
something at the next social deal. A social condition 
which shall not demand personal responsibility is the 
Utopia of thousands of dreamers. 

But the point of all I have to say is this : What 
is worth having comes at the cost which corresponds 
to its worth. If the end of life is to enjoy life, we 
must so live that enjoyment is possible to the end. 
If the end of life is to help our neighbours, the 



44 THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN 

conditions remain exactly the same. This is the lesson 
of human experience as to the search for happiness. 

All forms of subjective enjoyment are pleasures 
that begin and end with self, and are unrelated to 
external things, are insane and unwholesome, destruc- 
tive to effectiveness in life and of rational enjoyment. 
And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether 
the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the 
neurotic excesses of the sentimentalist, or the riots 
of a debauchee. 

It is not for you, taking Kipling's words, " with all 
your life's work to be done, that you must needs 
go dancing down the devil's swept and garnished 
causeway, because forsooth there is a light woman's 
smile at the end of it." It is not for you to seek 
strength by hazard or chance. Power has its price, 
and its price is straight effort. 

It is not for you to seek pleasure and strength in 
drugs, whose only function is to deceive you, whose 
gifts of life are not so real as your own face in the 
glass. 

It is not for you to believe that idleness brings 
rest, or that unearned rest brings pleasure. You are 
young men and strong, and it is for you to resist 
corrosion, and to help stamp it out of civilised 
society. 

( A man ought to be stronger than anything that 
can happen to him.y He is the strong man who can 

L.ofC. 



THE STRENGTH OF BEING CLEAN. 45 

say no. He is the wise man who, for all his life, 
can keep mind and soul and body clean. 

" I know of no more encouraging fact," says 
Thoreau, **than the ability of a man to elevate his 
life by conscious endeavour. It is something to paint 
a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make 
a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious 
to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium 
through which we look. This morally we can do." 



THE END. 



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